Actor. ... "They called me a wiseguy," Caan told Vanity Fair. Once I asked him if he had anything like a personal motto that summed up his philosophy of life. “I think finally to let go of the narcissism that has him isolated in himself. Tells him that in the first one, a new cross-fade, they can either do a "slop" for $200 or go for an "optical" for $1,200. They're trying to get a version ready to show for Stanley Cavell's class at Harvard and a one-night screening at MOMA, and these technical changes should have been the finishing touches. But Al believes it's about his process-versus-product notion. And of course it’s a complete fraud—he can’t control it—but he has to perform this trick on live television and he does all the things about getting it up, and he even says, ‘I’ll just let it get up a little further,’ till finally he’s screaming, ‘Get it off!’”. Anyway, I was trying to figure out where to suggest we meet after the day’s work on the set was done. The Dog Day role is pretty extreme material (though based on a real incident), the kind of thing where one false note could be fatal to a performance. It's a terrific thriller premise, but what raises it above the genre is the doomed elegiac note of that somber "Sea of Love" song, a note of desperation reflected in Pacino's performance: he's not just investigating a lonely-hearts murderer, he's investigating the death inside his own heart. Including one of Al’s favorite scenes: a desperate, lonely two A.M. phone call he makes to his ex-wife in her new husband’s bed. To hear him talk about it, something similar had happened to him after the Godfather movies. His most recent clandestine phase—all those unpublicized readings, the workshops, the decision to abandon product for process for a while—came from a similar impulse, he says, although it was less a desperate measure than a conscious choice this time. "But I dream about it: no clock. But then there was a big scandal—he got involved with an alderman’s wife. "It's that scene where Peer's running away from something or other," he says. Joe Papp had brought together Pacino, Streep, Chris Walken, Raul Julia—the elite of that generation of New York stage-based film actors—to explore a New York Shakespeare Festival Hamlet production. (Pacino's stage work, most recently in Mamet's American Buffalo and Rabe's Pavlo Hummel, has consistently won him more critical praise and awards than his films. ", "I have a feeling," I said, "this might be a secret fantasy of yours, to run off, change your identity, and come back as a kind of anonymous...", "It's very . Needless to say, they get involved, and the deeper they get, the more she looks like the killer. And I thought, No. and I said, '. “Maybe try out some changes down the line. I've seen two more versions of it since that first screening, and though there have been changes in cross-fades, though flash-forwards have come and gone, the cobra-like menacing charm of Graham, the character he plays, remains riveting. He did it first in a church with the Theatre Company of Boston in 1973. In the six years since Scarface, the Hamlet of Hollywood has been locked into the pale cast of thought— doing covert stage work and obsessing over the cutting and recutting of a fifty-minute masterpiece.Now he's emerging from his clandestine phase with Sea of Love, and preparing for Godfather III with … “Because God knows who you are.”). I ask him if he thinks wanting fame or having it is the disgrace, the perversion. Like Revolution, the only feature film he made in the six years between Scarface in 1983 and his return to the screen this fall in Sea of Love. There was also a fame crisis, and a death crisis (he'd lost a couple of people very close to him), all of which cumulatively produced something on the order of a deep melancholic spiritual crisis which you can still see on tape— captured, embodied in the character he plays in Bobby Deerfield. When he was a child of three or four his mother would take him to the movies and he’d come back home to their place in the South Bronx and recite the parts all by himself. He actually used the name Tony Montana, and somewhat foolishly laundered his profits through enterprises called Montana Cleaners and the Montana Sporting Goods Store. Which could mean cutting one or two early character-development scenes that establish Frank’s mid-life crisis. Al says something about needing to make some more movies to finance the ever evolving editing work on Stigmatic. Why? At that first Stigmatic screening, I naïvely asked Al if he'd ever do a full-scale production of National Anthems. Was the Method to blame? It's one of the few I've done that I watch again.". . 11/73. But Pacino’s choices in it are so inspired that it’s almost impossible to imagine any of it done any other way. "It sounds like what you're saying is that in the beginning, acting was therapy for you and then you needed to do a kind of therapy to separate from acting." “See, I wanted to read Hamlet over a five-week period with this group. Anyway, I ask Al what kind of artistic advice Strasberg had given him when they were playing opposite each other. Must Read: Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt Cover 'Vanity Fair Italia,' Armani to Dress Al Pacino for Broadway Plus, why Dutch models are having yet another moment in fashion. Beth asks him what he thinks about the way she recut the second scene. "In the dailies I came into the bank wearing glasses. The first version of Vanity Fair was published from 1913 to 1936. It's a funny line, but there's a double edge to it. There he learned histrionic demonstrativeness in order to get it across to his two deaf aunts. Al Pacino. Anyway, I took access to A.A. for a while—it was for a lot of reasons and I was asked to go there. Brando was on his best behavior during filming, buoyed by an impressive cast that included Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, James Caan and Diane Keaton. So here we are in a booth in the back of the Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset. "I remember my favorite was doing Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend, that scene where he's tearing up the house looking for a bottle. The saving grace of his obsessiveness, of his intensity about his work, is that he does have a sense of humor about himself. You know, his legendary indecisiveness, the reluctance to even say the word Action. He knows he has to do more films, if only to finance the editing-room rentals for Stigmatic, but it’s more than that. On the surface the story is about three petty crooks plotting a break-in and burglary. Then I found myself finally in Boston at one point and I realized I hadn’t moved at all. "I dressed like Dustin Hoffman," he said, flashing a killer grin. Tonight, for instance, sitting at my East Village kitchen table, he's dressed entirely in black. And the notion of disguise is one that holds a definite fascination for him. What has he been doing in those six years? Al's dressed in black, he's drinking black coffee and telling a sad but funny story about how he sabotaged a reading of the Nunnery Scene in Hamlet with Meryl Streep —and with it his last best chance to play the Prince. Process over product, or the process as the product. “He doesn't have that urban street beauty he had,” says Richard Price, who wrote the script for Sea of Love. "Because he wants to be caught. You could almost see his shrewd actor’s intelligence seizing on a comic possibility in the midst of reading a line, and by the time he got to the end flipping it inside out like a glove, with a final flick of inflection. In addition to Sea of Love, he's done an uncharacteristically lighthearted thing: an uncredited cameo in Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy, playing a bad guy known as "Big Boy," the Joker in the film. ". And I did stop drinking. .' And Peer Gynt is looking at him and says something like 'I've always thought of doing something like that, but to do it! Will be used in accordance with our Privacy Policy. Rudy Giuliani as Cicero against Michael Corleone’s Catilina?) “It was about a guy who had a huge python snake . His career went into the toilet,” an evidently embittered Oliver Stone was quoted in People as saying recently—apparently still aggrieved by Pacino’s decision (more than ten years ago) to drop out of Born on the Fourth of July. Then he discovered a new kind of liberation from acting, something that also seemed therapeutic at first. “The cards were high but . Gift options available at checkout. Maybe his wife, Kay, bitter over not getting custody of the kids, betrays him to Rudy Giuliani's grand jury. The Dog Day role is pretty extreme material (though based on a real incident), the kind of thing where one false note could be fatal to a performance. I didn’t pick up the Program, but I found it very supportive, meaningful. He's had twenty years on the force, and suddenly he's eligible for his pension and facing mortality for the first time. We blow it up and sometimes—I guess that's what therapy's all about. These Method actors . He got slaughtered by the critics, who, he believes, looked at his efforts through the distorting lens of his movie-stardom. "I've always thought of Michael as the kind of guy who will do it. . You can see the skull beneath his skin, and so, suddenly, can he. It's a phase he's not entirely out of yet, at least stylistically. That was early in 1988 when he had a small private screening of The Local Stigmatic. I get the feeling nothing’s ever final about Stigmatic. Because the more authentic way to learn lines is to first become the character; the closer you get to becoming the character, the closer you'll get to uttering the character's intended dialogue "spontaneously." Edizione digitale inclusa. That although he was a protégé of Strasberg's he doesn't use the most characteristic technique of the Method, "sense memory," milking personal emotions/traumas of the past to fuel acting emotions. But for Pacino, the Buffalo experience clinched the belief that he had discovered something important. ', "And that's why the play didn't get done. As Michael Corleone it was a cold, sinister kind of beauty, elegant ice. Back at the beginning of the editing-room conference, as Beth was getting ready to thread Stigmatic through the moviola reels, she mentioned something about a kidney-stone attack she'd suffered, one that hit her shortly after the birth of her first child. I was excited by it.". I went to East Berlin to Brecht’s theater to watch the Berliner Ensemble. “Pacino is a schmuck. Al’s dressed in black, he’s drinking black coffee and telling a sad but funny story about how he sabotaged a reading of the Nunnery Scene in Hamlet with Meryl Streep—and with it his last best chance to play the Prince. After gauging everyone’s reaction, Al took me aside and asked me what I’d thought of one of his clandestine stage appearances I’d happened to catch. The rest is just waiting." RON ROSENBAUM reveals the method behind the madness. . Al says, grinning. Here he’s got years on his face, he’s got weight in his face, gravity.”. Al claims that he’s not strictly a Method actor. "He's not beautiful anymore," says Richard Price, who wrote the sharp-edged Sea of Love script. “I’ve always thought of Michael as the kind of guy who will do it. “When I saw it on the screen,” he says of the dailies, “I thought, There’s no one up there. ", "That was it. It freed me up, made me feel good.”. ("Fame is the first disgrace," Graham hisses to his partner in crime. Over the phone one evening he imitated for me the moaning sounds the bear made as he was forced to act out being wounded over and over again. I always thought you could do a great movie of him beginning with him giving an interview as an Indian chief.”, “I have a feeling,” I said, “this might be a secret fantasy of yours, to run off, change your identity, and come back as a kind of anonymous . He’s only half joking. This was an unpublicized workshop reading of a two-act play he'd done at New Haven's Long Wharf Theatre, to which I'd been tipped off a few weeks before. It wasn’t life or death I looked like I was getting through.”, It gave him perspective, “that everything’s not all that extraordinary, each crisis. He’s probably one of the few actors who like the dread test-screening focus-group process, because it gives him the kind of opportunity to rethink his work that he usually gets only onstage during the course of a long run. Money isn’t a real problem, he says, but he likes to use the pressure of financial need to force himself into action, i.e., making films. Curiously, when Pacino talks about his decision to come out of his clandestine phase, he talks about it in terms of becoming more like Michael Corleone, someone who can execute cold-blooded plans. His longtime producer and friend, Martin Bregman, used the word "explosiveness" to describe why audiences found Pacino's screen presence so riveting. I suggest if he’s going to use a thematic epigraph, he should take the line from the play “Fame is the first disgrace” because it’s less didactic-sounding. Jack Nicholson: Anatomy of an Actor AUD$49.95 CAD$45.00 €39.95 £29.95 T45.00 USD$45.00. When Pacino tells stories about his early, pre-Strasberg years as a performer, he sounds as if he were talking about a different person; he acts like a different person: you hear the unpremeditated exuberance of a natural mimic, the instinctive entertainer; he speaks freely, almost effusively, rather than choosing words as carefully as a tightrope walker testing his footing, as he does when he talks about his later work. Features AL PACINO: OUT OF THE SHADOWS. Might he have been a greater actor, or at least a more productive great actor, without it? To do it!' Or: another possibility. there’s a feeling that you experience when you put on glasses and a mustache and you blend in. Anyway, I ask Al what kind of artistic advice Strasberg had given him when they were playing opposite each other. In fact, although Stigmatic features one of the most brilliant Pacino performances on film, it’s one you’ll probably never see, because he’ll never let go of it, never stop editing and re-editing it. .”. Speaking the dialogue of serious drama, “I felt I could speak for the first time. But what he really wants is to scheme and talk about it, which actually doing it would ruin.". For a brief floodlit instant, power and stardom are thrust upon him. I suggested we need to see Michael defeated to make him human again. ", "Yes, and they made him an Indian chief and when he came back and was interviewed he wouldn't speak to anyone unless he was in Indian garb.